The provocative political thinker asks if it will be with a bang or a whimper. After years of ill health, capitalism is now in a critical condition. Growth has given way to stagnation; inequality is leading to instability; and confidence in the money economy has all but evaporated. In How Will Capitalism End?, the acclaimed analyst of contemporary politics and economics Wolfgang Streeck argues that the world is about to change. The marriage between democracy and capitalism, ill-suited partners brought together in the shadow of World War Two, is coming to an end. The regulatory institutions that once restrained the financial sector’s excesses have collapsed and, after the final victory of capitalism at the end of the Cold War, there is no political agency capable of rolling back the liberalization of the markets. Ours has become a world defined by declining growth, oligarchic rule, a shrinking public sphere, institutional corruption and international anarchy, and no cure to these ills is at hand.

Table of Contents:

-- 1: How will capitalism end?
-- 2: The crisis of democratic capitalism
-- 3: Citizens and Customers : considerations on the new politics of consumption
-- 4: The rise of the European consolidation state
-- 5: Markets and people : demopcratic capitalism and European integration
-- 6: Heller, Schmitt and the Euro
-- 7: Why the Euro divides Europe
-- 8: Comment of Wolfgang Merkel, 'Is capitalism compatible with democracy?'
-- 9: How to study contemporary capitalism?
-- 10: On Fred Block, 'Varieties of what? : should we still be using the concept of capitalism?
-- 11: The public mission of sociolocy